I’ve seen so much of this in the past few days, I can’t help but write something here. If you, like me, are not from near the U.S.-Mexico border, you probably have no idea that all this was going on.
The border is a police state. And I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t mean that as some kind of exaggeration. It really is. I’ve been driving for the past few days near the border, anywhere from right up against it to about a hundred miles away, and the sheer presence of the border patrol here is overwhelming. Some days, some roads, from two-thirds to three-quarters of all the vehicles I see are U.S. Border Patrol. I’m surprised when I see a vehicle with lights on top that’s actually the police, as opposed to the USBP.
They’re set up everywhere. Driving along New Mexico Highway 9 last night, I passed a Border Patrol set-up every half-mile or so — that may not sound like much, but consider that that means an hour of driving means you’ve passed literally hundreds of posts. They’re out there with big white SUVs; a good fraction of them are towing trailers that have a couple of all-terrain vehicles on them. There are helicopters that cruise overhead, even in national parks; some of the SUVs extend giant crane arms about twenty feet into the air with what I can only assume is infrared radar, to detect the heat from human beings. There are tan tents set up to keep the heat off them, and they move around very frequently. They are the major presence out here — far more than tourists, residents, farmers, or anything else.
They’ve clearly been supplemented with the National Guard, too. About a third of the posts are manned by men in Hummers, wearing camouflage, and fully attired in military gear. They carry M-16s on their backs and could clearly take on a fairly substantial military assault.
There are checkpoints all over the place. I’ve probably gone through half a dozen and passed nearly two dozen. (I’m usually going towards the border, rather than away, so often I don’t have to go through them.) They’re random and clearly mobile, able to set up in a matter of minutes and come back down that quickly, too. They only ask me where I’ve come from, where I’m going, and if I’m a U.S. citizen…but I suspect that if my vehicle weren’t clearly totally incapable of smuggling someone, or if I looked like I might actually be Mexican, things would be a whole lot different. I’ve seen cars stopped by the side of the road and searched to the point that belongings were absolutely all over the place.
The border itself is stunning. Apparently in rural areas there’s only a barbed-wire fence on the border, but in anything remotely populated the fence is enormous — at least twenty feet high, and something that would take major construction equipment to cut through. There are enormous spotlight towers running off of generators that are on 24/7, and USBP SUVs every few hundred feet. I stopped to take pictures and it was obvious that a dozen people had their eyes on me — probably out of curiosity, just because it seemed obvious I wasn’t trying to sneak in to Mexico, but, still, it was an eerie feeling.
And then there are the border towns: they feel like this weird hybrid of Mexico and the US. In Nogales, AZ, people have put razor wire and fences up around their houses — on the US side of the border. There are swaths of the US side that are built, frankly, like nothing I’d ever expect to encounter here — they look like they’re about to slide down the hill and can’t possibly meet any modern building codes. There are people hanging out in the street and in their cars, doing who-knows-what… I’m not an easily-scared person, but there were times I was glad I’m a rather tall, young male — and with a waiting fast car, too.
More notes: a huge fraction of the USBP agents I’ve seen and/or met are clearly of Latino background; some of them even speak English with thick Latino accents. (I’m not well-versed enough in Latin American Spanish to distinguish, say, a Mexican accent from a Guatemalan or Salvadorean one.) It makes me wonder how they feel about this — I’m well aware that they may be (and almost certainly are) U.S. citizens every bit as much as I am, but there’s got to be a bit of a shared bond there that must make capturing and deporting illegal aliens something of an emotionally difficult act.
Second: having said all this, like many cases of this, the individual USBP agents I’ve met have been incredibly professional, incredibly friendly, and generally terrific human beings in their contact with me. I’ve never felt anything but served by them, and, honestly, I feel safer in some of these areas than I ever have at home in Berkeley, California. Also, these guys have hard jobs: a lot of them work at night, all night long; they’re out there in the blazing heat, the awful humidity, the thunderstorms and rain, the mud, and anything else that’s going on. The fact that they do their jobs with such professionalism despite these factors is a real testament to the people involved. (Last night after dark I stopped at a checkpoint, and I remember thinking: wow, they hung netting from their floodlights…I wonder why? It was only when I got close that I realized it wasn’t netting — it was the sheer volume of insects that were swarming around the lights. I thought they were waving me over to the side of the road, when they were just swatting the insects away. I felt humbled by the fact that my job involves nothing like that, ever.)
My purpose here today is not so much to make a political statement as to illuminate what’s going on: like everybody, I’ve heard the immigration discussion in the news, I’ve heard all the debates, and I have my viewpoints. But being here is something completely different, and completely unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. You really have to be here, to see it, to really understand what it’s about. It’s a police state down here — it really is. And while I’m not saying we should simply open up the border wide to any and all comers, it does immediately strike you: there must be a better way. There really must. It doesn’t feel like border control — it feels like a police state.
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